Romance: a function of privatization in Domination culture

imperialism enacting nuclear familydom and the rewilding of intimacy when surrendering to the Journey

In a world where care can feel like a sparse resource, the dream of finding “the one” evokes a fantastical reverie, in which one is promised lightness and ease. If only, the right person could arrive, and we can relax into fully being seen, held, and resourced for the rest of our days.

This mindset is one I have been grappling with for much of my life and is one I see many of my peers grappling with. As I deepen with values of village and relationship ecology, I am reckoning with a reality I’ve been scared until now to name.

Which is this: that modern romance is a function that enforces Domination culture, rooted in a scarcity minded economic system, that privatizes care and resources, hides violence from the collective, and then expresses itself as the modern “privileges” of coupledom.

When we are swimming in a sea of culture built on oppression, accepting we have inherited vestiges that burrow deep into our psyches, bodies, and nervous systems iterating what has been offered to us, we might grow our awareness and start having choice around what cultural norms we seed for the future.

In this blog post, I will be challenging some of the notions of modern romance and connecting the dots between the culture of Domination and the culture of Romanticization. More and more, I am recognizing that how we culturally see romance is imbued with subtle forms of ownership, entitlement to resources, and the disintegration of village life.

Is the allure of romance really the allure of privatization? The promise of security reinforced by a powerful narrative based in the fear of being left alone to fend for ourselves? Is modern romance only possible due to the few and far between options for our care being either: support from the State or support by our complex and often disparate nuclear families?

At the heart of it, each one of us longs for care, support, love, and generosity. What I have found, is how easy it can be to default into ideals of romance as the strategy to meeting these longings. Yet, the opportunity to creatively return ourselves to the wholeness of village life, is an act of defiant lovemaking to the spirit of our humanity. Our inherent ecology, our belonging to the whole, our sacred inheritance of living in ever widening circles of love.

Privatization of care and “my person”

Our system for health, education, and housing in the Western context is hugely dependent on one’s life inheritance. Whether someone was raised in a neighborhood that had no access to fresh foods or were barred from educational opportunities due to a school’s opinions on mental divergences, our country is one where care is contextual.

The basic physical needs for our bodies to feel safe, whole, and able to rest, is not guaranteed by community, the state, or our families. We are required to perform productivity to receive the support we need.

Sometimes this performance looks like, westernizing or assimilating ourselves, compartmentalizing our parts to become acceptable by community, or claiming alliance to certain kinds of ideals of “freedom” and “self-agency,” that allow us to live in an isolated autonomous mode of taking care of our “own.”

Our care has become privatized and systematized, hirable, exportable, industrialized, and depersonalized. In this reality, our romantic partner, our nuclear system, has become a gateway towards what care we can afford, participate in, and access.

It makes sense to me that, the gravity of finding, “my person,” is the one holdout against the terrifying reality of navigating this system alone. The perception that one person can make or break our future standard of living, is rooted in the devastating reality of a system forcibly removing us from cohesive units of care.

When the allure of finding “my person,” is functioning as our strategy to finding safety, we find ourselves seeking out power rather than partnership, and certainty rather than the capacity for mutual change and growth.

The privatization of relationships, including claiming ownership of land and partner, is essential to cultivating siloed nuclear units, where we have the “rights” to dictate what happens or doesn’t within these spaces.

Safety has turned into control and protection from the chaos and natural order of the changeable realities of life, leaving little room for the mysteries of spirit, and the sensual pleasures of being alive in an infinitely transforming world.

The violence of romance claiming the rights to intimacy

There is a quiet violence in the way we’ve normalized the separation of all things. We have become agents who perpetuate divides that do not exist in nature. Fence lines that give us the illusion of separation while the soil below is teeming with the conversations between trees on either side of the fence.

When we separate and compartmentalize ourselves, our field of view begins to narrow. We trust fewer people, unable to access intimacy outside of those who we label as partners. In popular culture it has become a subversive expectation, that when one holds the title of romantic partner, they are immediately prioritized, made important, promoted to director in our lives,¹ while all other relationships get deprioritized.

And, what of all the partners before this one? Do they not receive the titles, the accolades, the well-wrought appreciation of paving the road before ever seeing where it’d go? In modern romance culture, we cast away the past and give ourselves to the redefining of what could be.

It is in the root of the word romance itself, stemming from the Latin word romanicus, which means of the Roman style, to be of Rome.

To be of Rome is to be an ancient conqueror, an imperialist prototype that seized, enveloped, and took culture, renaming it as their own.

Nestled within the formula of romance is the justification of claiming and being claimed. It is a dance that requires a price of worthiness, of what can be ours, if we display the right cards.

Why I wonder, are we satisfied with this modern-day swan dance?

A moment for romantic sobriety, and enfolding the village into our love decisions

I’ll be honest, this blog post has been difficult for me to write. While I write it, I feel the shining light of what I name, illuminating my shadows, my past, all the ways romance has brought me into a version of myself I feel ill about.

There is a part of me that questions if my judgements around romance have been created from a place of spite. Romance has always triggered in me a kind of inauthenticity that has felt like proving myself, people pleasing, and creating an illusion of who I am.

So, perhaps it’s easier for me to make connections between the systemic hell hole we’re collectively digging ourselves into, and a place in which I struggle immensely.

Yet one of the key insights that relationship ecology supports me in, is recognizing that the macro always plays into the micro. That this phenomenon of romance has only taken the floor of public consciousness within the last few generations, rising from a newfound agency in choosing our partners.

This coinciding with the loss of village life, community ties, obligations to our families of origin, global imperialist regimes, I can only understand romance as a function of all the impacts of our times. Claiming its title as the proprietor of love and belonging within a fractured ecosystem, it tries to mitigate the gaping hole we inherit from a disconnection to the whole.

“Extended families were mutual-aid societies, and clans were bundles of extended families, and villages were the amalgam of family-mediated belonging to a given piece of holy ground, bound by stories, ancestral memory, and a willingness to live for and, sometimes, die for the same kinds of things,” Stephen Jenkinson.

Perhaps, it is the villager within me, that calls for more. That says romance is not enough and is tired of the charade of what it has looked like for me and my peers. It is the part of me that wants my spirit family to get involved with my love life, to have their opinions aired around who and what is compatible for me. To recognize that their livelihoods depend on the partner I journey with, and whoever I date will impact their day to day lives. Romance takes on an approach of “us against the world,” and what relationship ecology calls for is, what services the whole.

To service the whole is different from placating our families of origin. Rather, it is holding hands with the collective system we need to thrive in and our own inner light that illuminates our way.

When we see romantic potentials not as a boat to ferry us away into a new reality, but as an enfolding piece of what already exists within our ecosystem, how might we move more gently, more intentionally, and with greater heed to what already exists?

Putting down romance for the journey

In romance, the beginning phase poses the biggest promise. In a journey, the beginning has us confront the abyss.

In romance, we showcase our potential. In a journey, we reveal our level of practice.

In romance, when we confront our shadows it marks the end of the romance, in a journey when the storm brews and breaks loose, that marks the true beginning.

In romance, the gaps and the obscurities enliven mystery and an allure of what might be. In a journey, when we are left without company, it means we are both choosing to walk a different path.

I pray to put down romance for the sake of love. If I am to love myself and the other at the same time, I must recognize how deep the promise of a nuclear family utopia is built on privatized land and lineage, forcing us to grasp on to romantic outcomes that minimize the epic view of the journey now.

It is in romance where we seek the illusion of privatization, seek out partnership to rewrite our past, rely heavily on the dominant system to meet our needs in the absence of village life.

When we surrender ourselves to a journey, we might find ourselves gathering different companions to survive along the way. Each one, spectacular and important, are testaments to how we arrived where we are right now.

Might we recognize the fullness of what brought us here, and feel ourselves strung up in a web of relations. In the stickiness of this web, the inability to separate the tendrils, mark stark lines of separation, becomes a humbling reminder of the mysteries of relationship. The ways where the simplicities of nuclear family realities might just be a bit too tired for those who long to bring back the reverence for a life that knows no borders. Only luscious yet harsh landscapes that require many companions to make the days ahead.

1. In my last relationship, I completely derailed my life, friendships, and practices for the promise of a romantic union. The allure of newness, of home, of ultimate belonging was all too promising.